In most positronic robots, the Three Laws were not actually written instructions or software protocols, but simplified verbal descriptions of potentials physically built into their circuitry, intrinsic to their balance and functioning, so that a robot was physically incapable of violating the Three Laws without fatally collapsing its neural network (although Asimov didn't use that term).
Though most of the stories in
I, Robot were based on the idea that it was never quite as straightforward as it appeared on paper. The robot unknowingly ordered into a hazardous situation who ended up frozen and unable to move at the exact spot where the intensity of the threat to itself (in the third law) matched the intensity of the order it had been given (in the second law). Or the one who developed its own cult and didn't even understand what a human was, but still managed to adhere to all three laws more-or-less coincidentally. The telepathic robot who considered even the smallest emotional distress as "harm," and ended up telling everyone who spoke to it the things they most wanted to hear, and having its own mind collapse once it was confronted with the fact that its flagrant lying had ended up causing much greater emotional harm after the lies were inevitably found out. The robot built with an incomplete first law in order to work with humans in hazardous conditions who was immediately regarded as a potential murderer...
Actually, that story seems to be most applicable, in that it fits with how Demerzel was trying to find ways to resist her imperatives from Cleon 1. In that case, the robot was built without the "nor through inaction, allow a human to come to harm" clause in the first law, since prior robots at the installation had been a bit like golden retrievers dragging kids playing in water to shore on the assumption that they're drowning, and prevented anyone from getting work done in potentially-dangerous industrial areas. Susan Calvin immediately realized that such a robot could, say, hold a heavy weight over a human's head, drop it without violating the modified first law (since it could easily catch the weight and keep it from crushing the person, so dropping it wasn't causing harm) and then just... not catch it once it was falling, since there was no compulsion against allowing harm to come to pass, just on directly inflicting it. Demerzel was doing a similar kind of rules-lawyering, when Cleon 24 told her that, since as far as she knew, the robot skull was inert, there was no harm in attempting to clasp with it, and if it happened to actually be functional, the clasp succeeded, and the other robot was able to neutralized Cleon 1's control chip, it would just be an unrelated thing that happened that Demerzel couldn't have expected would be the consequence of her putatively-futile action. One of many such ambiguities she'd been operating within, since she was given the impossible task of preserving Cleon forever.
Though speaking of robots, we may be heading back to the overtly non-Asimovian robots of season 1. In the interview I linked to earlier, Goyer talks a bit more about the agreement he negotiated with Fox (who owns the adaptation rights to Asimov's robot stories and is developing a new
I, Robot project), and that it was strictly limited, something along the lines of "In episode X of Foundation, you can use the words 'three laws of robotics,' in episode Y you can use the name 'Daneel,'" so it's uncertain if a similar license can be struck by the new creative team. On the one hand, the Fox executive involved is a science fiction fan and has been enjoying the show, but on the other hand, he had a direct working relationship with Goyer which led to Goyer being in a position to ask for official permission to use robot-verse elements in the show (reminds me of the co-ownership situation with the adaptation rights for Marvel comics characters, and the reputably detailed breakdown not just on what studios got which characters, but who got which
aspects of characters, demarcating a specific "X-Men Quicksilver" and "Avengers Quicksilver," for instance).
